...let's say you have had your Kindle for over a year and NEVER turned on whispernet and your Kindle is at an old firmware.

Why does Amazon not have the old .bin files available for download?

does anyone know what the inclusive updates are (if any) and where I could download old bin files for the US version of the K2, I found plently of K2i files but not US wireless, anyone know where I could grab the 2.3 series of .bin files specifically??

I had a 2.3.3 but can not find it, I just want to upgrade to 2.5 and be done, unless a future update can make my bed, I will NEVER deal with Amazon support again if I can complete the upgrade to 2.5 finally.

Do we know for a fact that 2.5.2 cannot be applied to versions older than 2.3.x? At approx. 13MB, I had sort of assumed that the 2.5.2 download was a full patch file, not an incremental upgrade.

Yeah. The bin files usually contain several updates, one for differing versions, for example the 2.5.2 update has 2.3 -> 2.5.2 update, 2.3.1 -> 2.5.2 update ... 2.3.4 -> 2.5.2 update. But they can't waste too much money on Whispernet charges to include a full update.

The 2.3 update was 17-18 megs, and contained updates for 2.0.x -> 2.3.

keeping updates small for whispernet makes sense but Amazon has no excuse for not having a full update available for 'net download.

maybe my situation was unique but it would seem that this would be a simple solution to the checksum errors I see scattered throughout the forums.
have a full download available that can upgrade from any version with checksum error file overwrite.

again Clarknova, thank you for all your help! It was a strange relief to see the upgrade complete after seeing that exclamation point failure graphic for so long

Yeah. The bin files usually contain several updates, one for differing versions, for example the 2.5.2 update has 2.3 -> 2.5.2 update, 2.3.1 -> 2.5.2 update ... 2.3.4 -> 2.5.2 update. But they can't waste too much money on Whispernet charges to include a full update.

The 2.3 update was 17-18 megs, and contained updates for 2.0.x -> 2.3.

The 2.5.3 update only works for 2.5.2 (and is less than 100k).

Thanks for the clarification. I guess that both explains why the manual install files are so big, and why I'm glad I don't have to work in configuration management for the Kindle development team.